Medieval Environmental History

Narrative sources of the medieval period from the historic lands of the Rus' principalities, which include parts of
modern-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Eastern Poland, provide a trove of historical weather information. The long
tradition of Russian climate historical research is rather unknown outside of this region

Pre-print, German version to be published in: Karfunkel – Zeitschrift für erlebbare Geschichte. Combat-Sonderheft 10 (2014) (in print; communicating science to the public).

Abstract: The Crusaders, who in the 11th Century moved in the thousands from Western and Central Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean to liberate the Holy Grave from the “infidels”, found themselves confronted not only with foreign cultures and violent armed resistance, but also with an alien natural environment and climatic conditions that could prove to be sometimes just as fatal as the arrows of the enemy. At the same time the Crusades fell into a period of quite changeable climatic conditions in Europe and the Middle East, which must be included as well in the historical analysis of the military events.

Article about the reception of a putative volcanic dust veil across Europe in September 1465 and the hypothesis it might be the infamous Kuwae eruption, long time dated to 1452, now recently to 1458. The contribution aims to reconstruct the possible impact of the eruption in the second half of the 1460s, but makes also clear that it might be wrong to assume all volcanic mega eruptions behaved like Tambora 1815. Finally the article puts forward the assumption (and gives examples) that volcanic events of the kind might be a good starting point for a medieval environmental history with global aspects.

Bauch, Martin, The Day the Sun Turned Blue. A Volcanic Eruption in the Early 1460s and its Possible Climatic Impact – a Natural Disaster Perceived Globally in the Late Middle Ages?, in: Schenk, Gerrit J. (Hg.), Historical Disaster Experiences. A Comparative and Transcultural Survey between Asia and Europe, Heidelberg 2017, S. 107-138.

See full volume here: http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319491622

En Savoie, les seigneur laïcs s'intéressent peu aux forêts de montagne. Les principaux protagonistes sont ici les monastères et surtout les communautés rurales. Par communautés nous entendons ici les communautés de paroisse ou de hameaux mais aussi les consortages, c'est à-dire des syndicats d'exploitants forestiers. A partir du XIIIe siècle, les droits des communautés sur les forêts d'altitude sont mis à plat et renégociés avec les seigneurs principalement sous la forme d'actes dits d'albergements. Dans le même temps de nombreux conflits forestier aboutissent à la délimitation des domaines forestiers de communautés. C'est enfin le temps où les communauté mettent en place et éventuellement par écrit des règles de gestion durable de leur domaine forestier.

What influence did climate have on disease in Late Antiquity? Natural archives of pre-instrumental temperature indicate significant summer cooling throughout the period. The coolest stretch spanned the 6th and 7th c., and corresponds startlingly to the appearance of the Justinianic Plague in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on principles from landscape epidemiology, this paper marries textual evidence for disease with palaeoclimatic data, in order to understand how gradual and dramatic climatic change, the 535-50 downturn especially, may have altered the pathogenic burden carried in Late Antiquity. Particular attention is paid to the Justinianic Plague, but the potential impacts of a changing climate on malaria and non-yersinial, non-plague, epidemics are not overlooked.

This thesis explores perceptions of earthquake causality in the accounts of twelfth-century Syria and the ways that medieval views of natural disasters influenced historical writing. Examining the perceived causes, effects, and significance of cataclysmic seismic events provides insight into shared elements of faith perspectives, the role of nature in medieval worldviews, and how chroniclers framed accounts of natural disasters to reflect their religious and political prejudices. Medieval writers believed that natural phenomena were indicative of important world events and imbued with spiritual significance. Chroniclers perceived earthquakes as omens of future disaster or the apocalypse, and associated them with a need for repentance due to their belief that seismic disasters were divine punishment for moral failings. In addition, Christian and Muslim sources utilized these perceptions on divine causality to criticize the failings of political leaders and rival religious communities. These patterns of portrayal possess great significance in the context of the major conflicts and cultural convergences in the twelfth-century Near East. In addition to the theological perspectives and political criticism present in the sources, terrestrial and astrological explanations for earthquakes were prevalent in the twelfth century and often used to complement, not disprove, perceptions of divine causation. Apocalyptic sentiment and crusading spirituality also influenced portrayals of earthquakes, particularly in the Christian sources. These intellectual patterns are evident in earthquake accounts from the period irrespective of religious and cultural differences, but were firmly grounded in the political realities of the Levant during the Crusades. The sources’ methods of portraying seismic disasters, therefore, provide important insight into the worldviews of medieval chroniclers and the broad effects of earthquakes amidst the complex dynamics of twelfth-century Syria.

In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it in her classic „A Distant Mirror“ (1978) , the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century.
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general potentially crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities – while Byzantium´s power dwindled away, Hungary entered a period of strong rulership and external power in the reign of Louis I of Anjou (1342-1382), for instance. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them ; accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies.
In order to be able to capture the local variations and complexities, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. Mono-causal or linear explanations are inadequate for the analysis and the description of crisis, transformation or collapse of pre-modern polities. Within this framework, complex systems are understood as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists who became interested in complexity theory tried to use its concepts and terminology for the conceptualisation and description of phenomena in their own fields, but often only in a “metaphoric” way. Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field. Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development. While these studies help us construct analytical tools for the macro-level of our own research, they run the same risk as earlier scholarship of neglecting complex variations at the local and regional levels.
Therefore, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of „systems theory“ developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in order to capture the interveawements between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment. In addition, we employ the methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals.
Overall, as a complement to earlier studies our analytical
approach shall allow us to capture the “diversité véritable” of our period without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them in his remarkable study on Southeast Asia in Global Context, 2009 ) of this “first world crisis” across all cultures and societies. The scientic value of this approach will be demonstrated for some specific cases.

Philosophical anthropology has taken an ‘ontological turn’ to focus on humankind’s basic intuitions about the organization of the living world. For example, a perception that links creatures up in material networks of sympathies and antipathies (ontological analogism) differs from a perception that creatures are linked together by cognition and cross-species communication (ontological animism). These incompatible ontologies make many appearances in medieval books of beasts, alongside a more familiar ontological dualism that divides humankind fundamentally from other creatures. A thirteenth-century Bestiary manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 764, illustrates how medieval books of beasts articulate their ontological heterogeneity, and how this heterogeneity can illuminate contemporary environmental theory.

AUTHOR'S DECLARATION I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public.

En 1346, Philippe VI de Valois promulgua l’ordonnance de Brunoy. Ce long document visait à réorganiser l’administration forestière du royaume afin de tirer des forêts un meilleur profit et d’en assurer une gestion durable et rationnelle. Pendant longtemps, les historiens y ont vu la première expression d’une politique forestière de la part des souverains français, les véritables fondements de la foresterie française. En réalité, les politiques de Philippe VI sont tributaires de près d’un siècle et demi de règlementations progressivement développées sous les derniers Capétiens directs. C’est à partir du règne de Philippe Auguste, et plus spécifiquement avec la conquête de la Normandie en 1204, que les souverains français s’intéressèrent de plus près aux ressources forestières de leur domaine. Dès le début du XIIIe siècle, les riches forêts
royales de Normandie furent administrées selon un régime toujours plus strict visant à limiter l’accès aux usagers et à garantir un rendement fiscal optimal. La forêt servait alors un rôle complexe. Outre son apport fiscal, elle jouait un rôle essentiel dans l’économie rurale, tout en constituant un espace sur lequel s’exerçait la justice, le pouvoir et la générosité des princes médiévaux. L’étude des sources administratives du long XIIIe siècle, s’étendant du règne de Philippe Auguste à celui de Charles IV, permet de brosser un portrait plus complet de la formation d’une première politique forestière française. Celle-ci s’articule autour de la création d’une administration dirigée par un corps d’officiers spécialisés, les maîtres des Eaux et Forêts, et de l’élaboration d’un corpus de règlementations visant, sous l’auspice d’une politique du « bien commun », à maintenir un équilibre entre conservation, utilisation et exploitation. Loin d’être le lieu de solitude dépeint dans la littérature médiévale, la forêt normande, siège des tractations entre l’ancienne coutume et le droit royal naissant, était plutôt un espace borné, délimité et rationalisé selon cet ensemble de règlementations et de limitations, et constituait un lieu de contact, voire de conflit, entre les usagers et le pouvoir royal.

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In 1346, Philip VI of Valois enacted the Ordinance of Brunoy. This lengthy document aimed at reorganizing the kingdom’s forest administration in order to ensure that royal forests remained sufficiently profitables and adequately managed. For most of the past century, historians have believed the Ordinance of Brunoy to be the first true expression of the forest policies of the French crown. In reality, Philip VI benefited from a wealth of regulations already in place which had been developped by his predecessors since the beginning of the XIIIth century. It can be argued that the reign of Philip Augustus, and especially his conquest of Normandy in 1204, truly marks the inception of the first forest policies by the French royal government. From that time on, royal forests in Normandy were managed according to a set of strict regulations aiming at limiting usage rights and guaranteeing a steady contribution to the kingdom’s finances. Forests during the Middle Ages served multiple purposes : beside their input in royal finances, they were vital to rural economy, and formed a space over which medieval princes exercised their justice, authority, power and generosity. The study of administrative sources from XIIIth and XIVth Normandy gives a better understanding of the development of these early policies, which revolved around the creation of a new administration headed by the masters of « Eaux et Forêts » and the formulation, under the auspices of common good, of a set of rules and regulations aiming at maintaining a balance between conservation, exploitation and usages. In truth, the forests of medieval Normandy were far from the archetypal woodlands of medieval litterature : they appear as a well delimited and rationalized space, managed and monitered by the king’s officers, and formed an area of contact and conflict between the royal government and the forests’ users.

The retreat of the Byzantine Army from Syria in around 650 CE, in advance of the approaching Arab armies, is one that has resounded emphatically in the works of both Islamic and Christian writers, and created an enduring motif: that of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier. For centuries, Byzantine and Islamic scholars have evocatively sketched a contested border: the annual raids between the two, the line of fortified fortresses defending Islamic lands, the no-man's land in between and the birth of jihad. In their early representations of a Muslim-Christian encounter, accounts of the Islamic-Byzantine frontier are charged with significance for a future 'clash of civilizations' that often envisions a polarised world. A. Asa Eger examines the two aspects of this frontier: its ideological and physical ones. By uniting an exploration of both the real and material frontier and its more ideological military and religious implications, he offers a more complex vision of this dividing line than has been traditionally disseminated. With analysis grounded in archaeological evidence as well the relevant historical and religious texts, Eger brings together a nuanced exploration of this vital element of medieval history.

Traducido de REVIEW, XXVI, 2, 2003, 97-172  Les estoy agradecido a Diana Carol Moore Gildea y Brett Clark, que leyeron y comentaron sucesivos borradores de este artículo. Por la discusión y los comentarios, gracias también a 10 "[L]as ciudades tenían unas tasas de matrimonios y nacimientos más bajas que las aldeas rurales. Como esto en conjunto producía, a lo sumo, solo un incremento muy gradual, es obvio que las ciudades no reemplazaban su población, por lo que eran dependientes del campo" (Russell, 19972: 64). 11 "Para alrededor del 1200, la mayoría de los mejores suelos de Europa occidental habían sido despojados de bosques y cada vez se forzaban más asentamientos hacia las áreas más marginales de arcillas pesadas o suelos arenosos finos en la parte más alta de las tierras cálidas" (Ponting, 1991: 122). 12 La expansión de los colonizadores medievales fue particularmente vigorosa a lo largo del Báltico suroriental, cuyos suelos arenosos eran especialmente proclives al agotamiento (Anderson, 1974a:: 247).

The interrelationships between environment, climate and society are by definition highly complex, and only a close analysis of the specific mechanics of change can reveal any putative causal connections. This paper will take the case of Byzantine Anatolia between the 6th and 8th c., together with the case of the small provincial city of Euchaïta in the Pontus, and examine some of the evidence for such causal links. As part of this discussion, I will suggest some of the reasons for the survival of the eastern Roman empire during the crisis of the later 7th and early 8th c.

Francis of Assisi is well known for his devotion to all God’s “creatures,” from worms and fish to moon and stars. Francis’s devotion also has some little known dimensions that are unprecedented in his own time but that anticipate central tenets of post-humanist animal theory and ecotheology. In the earliest Franciscan documents, suppressed soon after his death, Francis asserted that he obeyed non-human animals as an expression of faith. He worshiped with them, protected their lives, and conflated their material welfare with their symbolic meanings. These aberrant features of Francis’s piety were suppressed soon after his death, but they merit close attention for the ways in which they anticipate contemporary theorists’ efforts to de-center the human, recognize animal participation in human cultures, and envision a coherently material and spiritual theology.

"La creación de espacios agrícolas. ganaderos, forestales y humanos que han pervivido durante siglos, definió la evolución de los sistemas naturales aragoneses en un proceso dialéctico
que parece culminar a mediados del siglo XIII. A partir de ese momento, fueros generales y ordenamientos locales pondrán su empeño en regular los conflictos de intereses generados en un mundo cada vez más lleno, donde la expansión del paisaje agrícola y ganadero, el afán de maximizar la renta feudal y los requerímientos del sistema de mercado amenazan a las masas forestales y a quienes sustentan en ellas sus precarias economías. El interés legislador inicia, en este sentido, una nueva etapa caracterizada por un cierto interés en la preservación de bosques
y montes a través de la penalización de comportamientos agresivos, esquilmadores y destructores de los recursos naturales."

El objetivo de nuestro trabajo es explicar a través del análisis comparado el porqué de los distintos modos de explotación ganadera practicada en dos espacios geográficos próximos, ubicados en el extremo occidental de los Pirineos. Por una parte, el caso guipuzcoano, ejemplo representativo de las áreas de influencia cantábrica, que se caracteriza por una ganadería no trashumante, trasterminante, apoyada en movimientos de corto radio entre los seles veraniegos e invernizos, dentro del propio valle o de sus inmediaciones. Por otra parte, los valles de Aezkoa, Salazar y Roncal, en el Noreste de Navarra -representativos de las áreas pirenáicas-, en los cuales, aún hallándose en la misma latitud que Guipúzcoa, observamos una trashumancia de ciclo largo que tiene como destino invernal las Bardenas de la Ribera tudelana o, alternativamente, las Landas bordelesas, en cada caso aproximadamente a un centenar de kilómetros de los valles de origen. Fecha de recepción del original: Marzo de 2002. Versión definitiva: Mayo de 2002 .

Obwohl den südkaukasischen Raum stets große naturräumliche und klimatische Unterschiede und sogar Extreme kennzeichneten, wurde der Umwelt- und Klimageschichte dieser Region bislang bei weitem zu wenig Beachtung gewidmet. Dabei erlauben für die mittelalterlichen Jahrhunderte nicht nur die zeitgenössischen Texte einheimischer und benachbarter Historiographien, sondern auch neueste Ergebnisse naturwissenschaftlicher Forschungen interessante Einblicke in den Einfluss von Klima und Natur auf die turbulenten historischen Entwicklungen. Basierend auf einer Kombination dieser beiden Quellenarten soll im Vortrag in Wort und Bild die Rekonstruktion klima- und umweltgeschichtliche Aspekte der politischen, demographischen und wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der mittelalterlichen Territorien von Armenien, Georgien und des Kaukasischen Albanien zur Diskussion und in den Kontext der Klimageschichte des ganzen mittelalterlichen Nahen Ostens gestellt werden.
Im Detail wird das spezifische Verhältnis zwischen Umwelt und Gesellschaft für die Region um den Van-See (heute Südosttürkei) betrachtet werden, die seit der Blütezeit des Königreichs Urartu im 9. Jh. v. Chr. durch umfangreiche Bewässerungslandwirtschaft gekennzeichnet war und im 9. bis 11. Jh. n. Chr. zum Zentrum einer neuer politischen Herrschaftsbildung (Königreich Vaspurakan) wurde, deren architektonischen Hinterlassenschaften (Kirche zum Hl. Kreuz auf der Insel Ałtʿamar im Van-See) bis heute zu den wichtigsten Denkmälern mittelalterlicher Kunst der Region zählen. Eine reiche lokale Historiographie und die (über das Mittelalter hinaus Jahrzehntausende überspannende) umweltgeschichtliche Auswertung von Bohrkernen aus dem Van-See erlauben hier eine im Vergleich zu anderen Gebieten detailliertere Rekonstruktion der Interaktion zwischen einer mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft und ihrer Umwelt.

Between the foundation of Constantinople as capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire in 330 CE and its sack by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 CE, the Byzantine Empire underwent a full cycle from political-economic stability, through rural insecurity and agrarian decline, and back to renewed prosperity. These stages plausibly correspond to the phases of over-extension (K), subsequent release (Ω) and recovery (α) of the Adaptive Cycle in Socio-Ecological Systems. Here we track and partly quantify the consequences of those changes in different regions of Anatolia, firstly for rural settlement (via regional archaeological surveys) and secondly for land cover (via pollen analysis). We also examine the impact of climate changes on the agrarian system. While individual histories vary, the archaeological record shows a major demographic decline between ca .650 and ca. 900 CE in central and southwestern Anatolia, which was then a frontier zone between Byzantine and Arab armies. In these regions, and also in northwest Anatolia, century-scale trends in pollen indicate a substantial decline in the production of cereal and tree crops, and a smaller decline in pastoral activity. During the subsequent recovery (α) phase after 900 CE there was strong regional differentiation, with central Anatolia moving to a new economic system based on agro-pastoralism, while lowland areas of northern and western Anatolia returned to the cultivation of commercial crops such as olive trees. The extent of recovery in the agrarian economy was broadly predictable by the magnitude of its preceding decline, but the trajectories of recovery varied between different regions.

Open Acces download: https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/529589
Pre-modern critical interactions of nature and society can best be studied during the so-called "Crisis of the 14th Century". While historiography has long ignored the environmental framing of historcial processes and scientists have over-emphasized nature's impact on the course of human history, this volume tries to describe the at times complex modes of the late-medieval relationship of man and nature. The idea of 'teleconnection', borrowed from the geosciences, describes the influence of atmospheric circulation patterns often over long distances. It seems that there were 'teleconnections' in society, too. So this volumes aims to examine man-environment interactions mainly in the 14th century from all over Europe and beyond. It integrates contributions from different disciplines on impact, perception and reaction of environmental change and natural extreme events on late Medieval societies. For humanists from all historical disciplines it offers an approach how to integrate written and even scientific evidence on environmental change in established and new fields of historical research. For scientists it demonstrates the contributions scholars from the humanities can provide for discussion on past environmental changes.

Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that: (1) abrupt environmental change was more closely linked to sociopolitical and demographic transformation than climate change; (2) landscape changes reflected the new sociopolitical priorities and persisted until the sociopolitical conditions shifted; (3) reorganization of new plant communities was very rapid, on the order of decades not centuries; and (4) legacies of forest management adopted by earlier societies continue to influence ecosystem services today.

Published in: Scientific Reports 8 (2018) 2138
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20286-4

This new series in environmental humanities will offer approaches to pre-industrial cultures from interdisciplinary environmental perspectives. We invite submissions (both monographs and edited collections) in the fields of ecocriticism, specifically new ecocritical analyses of under-represented literatures; waste studies; environmental history; environmental archaeology; animal studies and zooarchaeology; landscape studies; ‘blue humanities’, and studies of environmental / natural disasters and change and their effects on pre-modern cultures.

This paper uses the work of Late Antique (4th-6th century) Latin poets to demonstrate the ways that pre-modern sources can be a part of scholarly discussions of the development of environmental imaginations and can usefully contribute to the development of the environmental humanities. The three poets (Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Venantius Fortunatus) have many works that explore and describe nature; one theme that emerges is that they closely connected the rivers of Gaul to their concerns over political and cultural identity. Rivers, including the Rhone and the Mosel, were intricately woven into the daily life and cultural identities of 4th-6th century Gaul, and were both tangible and fluid political boundaries. These poems use rivers to confirm cultural identities, validate the Christian cultural experience, and express broader cultural and political concerns about cultural integration and hybridity.

„There are few theoretical approaches to which historian respond so negatively as to the explanation of historical processes by such theories“, the German historian Rainer Waltz states most accurately in his study on „Theories of Social Evolution and History“; there he also presents two main causes for this rejection: a moral one, the perversion of evolutionary thinking in so-called Social Darwinist theories in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a scientific one, the fear of a biologistic interpretation of human history by adopting evolutionary models (Walz, 2004). This distinguishes historical studies from other social sciences and humanities such as anthropology or sociology and even other historical disciplines such as archaeology, where evolutionary models have become part of the methodological toolkit (Renfrew & Bahn, 2008; for a rare example from the field of history of literature cf. Moretti, 2009).
Although most historians are reluctant to adopt evolutionary models (yet alone in their mathematized or sociobiologist form) for the interpretation of human past (respectively the larger or smaller period of time they are specialised in), terms such as “evolution” and concepts of evolutionary thinking such as “adaption” or “selection” are used in numerous descriptions of historical events and processes, albeit often in a metaphorical way (Walz, 2004). At the same time it is evident that major developments in human history such as the emergence of the human kind itself, of human culture and of complex social structures such as states as well as phenomena of long duration (up to the scale of “Big History” from the Big Bang until present times as it has been attempted in the last decades, Spier 2010) cannot be explained without the help of evolutionary concepts (cf. Blute, 2010; Voland, 2009); but again, these subjects refer mainly to the fields of evolutionary biologists and psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists or (prehistoric) archaeologists (cf. Yoffee, 2004). Some specialists from these disciplines have also tried to adapt such concepts for the entire human history beyond its “beginnings”, but have equally found mixed reception among historians, especially if they try to demonstrate some kind of progress in the development of humanity as for instance Steven Pinker has done most recently in his study on “Why Violence has declined” (Pinker, 2011; see also Atran, 2002; Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Morris, 2010).
In contrast to this (non)-use of evolutionary concepts for historical studies, we intend to demonstrate the benefit of a complex evolutionary approach for the analysis of a specific period of late medieval/early modern history between 1200 and 1500 CE, which has been attributed central importance for the so-called “Rise of the West”, since it saw the beginning of European overseas expansion at its end (cf. Goldstone, 2009; Morris, 2010).
In the “calamitous” 14th century, as Barbara Tuchman called it (1978), the medieval world entered a period of severe crisis in demography, economy, politics and religion. This crisis took hold in all regions, ranging from China in the East to England in the West. Even before the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death (1346-1352), deteriorating climatic conditions had ended the period of demographic and economic expansion that began in the 10th century (Behringer, 2007; Atwell, 2001; Benedictow, 2004; Brook, 2010).
The local and regional impacts and consequences of these general crisis-laden conditions may have differed; outcomes ranged from actual societal collapse to the emergence of powerful new polities. But these conditions provide a framework for global perspective on this period and allow us to use the 14th century-crisis as a field of “natural experiments of history”, as Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson have called them (Diamond & Robinson, 2011); accordingly, we analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies (cf. also Borsch, 2005). In particular, we will analyse and compare five polities in the “Old World”, England, Hungary, Byzantium, Egypt and China, of which three disappeared around the end of this period due to the expansion of the most successful newly emerged Ottoman Empire (Byzantium in 1453, Mamluk Egypt in 1517, Hungary in 1526/1541; cf. also Preiser-Kapeller, 2011).
In order to be able to capture variations and complexities within this sample, we adopt concepts and tools provided by the field of complexity science. We understand complex systems as large networks of individual components, whose interactions at the microscopic level produce “complex” changing patterns of behaviour of the whole system on the macroscopic level. In the last decades, historians and social scientists also tried to use concepts of complexity theory for the description of phenomena in their own fields, but again often only in a “metaphoric” way (Gaddis, 2002; Hatcher & Bailey, 2001). Less frequently, though, historians have tried to make use of the mathematical foundations of complexity theory or of quantitative tools provided by this field (Kiel & Elliott, 1997; Preiser-Kapeller, 2012). Recent scholarship has implemented some of these tools especially for the construction of macro-models of socio-economic development (Goldstone, 1991; Turchin, 2003; Turchin & Nefedov, 2009).
In addition, we combine complexity theory with the analytical framework of “systems theory” developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) in order to capture the interdependencies between politics, economy and religion within a polity and with the political, economic and ecological environment (Luhmann, 1997; Becker & Reinhardt-Becker, 2001; Becker, 2004). Luhmann´s theory is valuable for our analysis in various aspects; it makes us aware of the reduction of environmental and social complexity which is reflected in our historical sources, and it provides a framework to approach complex mechanisms within and the dependencies between various social spheres and their environment. Its evolutionary aspects have also been analysed by Walz (2004). In addition, we employ methods and tools of network analysis, which allow us to capture, analyse and model linkages and cause-effect correlations in society, economy, politics and religion on the macro- and micro-level down to groups and individuals (Gould, 2003; Lemercier, 2005).
Overall, our analytical approach allows us to capture the “diversité véritable” without losing track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”, as Victor Liebermann has called them, 2009) with regard to the transformation of polities and societies and their adaption to this “first world crisis”. Thereby, the value of a framework of evolutionary dynamics for the exploration of human history will be demonstrated

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Preiser-Kapeller...

This paper uses the work of Late Antique (4th-6th century) Latin poets to demonstrate the ways that pre-modern sources can be a part of scholarly discussions of the development of environmental imaginations and can usefully contribute to the development of the environmental humanities. The three poets (Ausonius, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Venantius Fortunatus) have many works that explore and describe nature; one theme that emerges is that they closely connected the rivers of Gaul to their concerns over political and cultural identity. Rivers, including the Rhone and the Mosel, were intricately woven into the daily life and cultural identities of 4th-6th century Gaul, and were both tangible and fluid political boundaries. These poems use rivers to confirm cultural identities, validate the Christian cultural experience, and express broader cultural and political concerns about cultural integration and hybridity. Resumen En este ensayo se utilizan textos de poetas latinos de la antigüe...

This paper takes as its starting point a definition of islands that goes beyond geographical isolation to consider islands as social constructs insofar as they reflect feelings of isolation, separateness, distinctiveness and otherness. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of the ‘dry’ island, an island that although once surrounded by water has long since lost its physical isolation due to changes in sea level and drainage patterns. Taking the Isle of Ely in the fens of East Anglia in the United Kingdom between AD 1200-1600 as a case study, and utilising archaeological evidence for diet and for the local Ely ware pottery, it is possible to reconstruct a cognitive mappa, which describes the perception of islandness amongst the island’s medieval inhabitants.

An epochal transformation of nature-society relations was inscribed in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This article advances three central propositions. First, the origins of today's global ecological crisis are found in the emergence of the capitalist world-economy in the "long" sixteenth century---not in industrialization, population growth, or market expansion, as the conventional wisdom would have it. Secondly, the crisis of feudalism was a general crisis not only of medieval Europe's political economy, but in equal measure an expression of feudalism's underlying ecological contradictions. Thirdly, the rise of capitalism effected a radical recomposition of world ecology. As early as the sixteenth century, we can see how the emergent logic of capital, which at once implies endless expansion and seeks to flatten socio-ecological diversity, undermined the possibilities for a sustainable relation between nature and society. Capitalism thus differed radically from feudalism and all other precapitalist formations. Where earlier ecological crises had been local, capitalism globalized them. From this standpoint, the origins of capitalism may shed light on today's ecological crises.

Metropolises with hundreds of thousands inhabitants such as Constantinople, Baghdad or Chang´an in China were the Mega-Cities of the Middle Ages. How was it possible to supply them, how to prevent epidemics and blasts on the basis of medieval technology? The dimensions and solutions of these problems are presented also in comparison with modern Vienna. 

Presentation at the Volkshochschule Urania, 1010 Vienna,
June 4th, 19-20:30 Uhr: http://www.vhs.at/kurs-details/vhs-wien-kurse/Moloch-oder-Metropole%3F-Kurs/287287892.html

Overview on the possibilities of quantitative research and Network Analysis for Medieval Studies.

Three main focuses:
* Quantitative data from the natural sciences: climatic and natural phenomena

* Quantitative data from medieval sources: economic and demographic quantities

* The complexity of medieval societies: social network analysis on the basis of medieval sources

Conclusio:
* Complexity allows us to establish a framework for comparative research across time and space > the patterns of interaction between environment and society and within societies are and were always complex.
* We can analyse how similar crisis phenomena influenced the development of societies with different (or similar) traditions, religions, institutions, geographies or ecologies > differences matter!
* At the same time, we do not  loose track of essential commonalities (the “strange parallels”) of environmental impacts and historical change in pre-modern societies.
* We recognize the high significance of endogenous social dynamics in the polities in this period, on which exogenous changes (such as climatic) and extreme events had an impact, but not along the lines of an overwhelming linear causation as postulated in (older and) recent research.

A historical study of two monasteries in the medieval Ardennes may at a first glance not be very attractive reading for ecocritics. Yet Ellen F. Arnold, historian at Ohio Wesleyan University, explores medieval views about nature and the environment not only through historical source material such as charters and annals, but also by way of the huge variety of hagiographic-and thus literary-texts that these monasteries produced. Her study therefore also provides insights into the relation between literature and the environment during the Middle Ages.

The statistical analysis is based on binary time series (1 = presence of an event in that year, 0 = absence) for plague epidemics in the entire of the Mediterranean and the Near East for the 6th to 8th century and for the Aegean region and Egypt for the period 1347-1500.
Mean waiting times between years with events were calculated on the basis of an expectation test for a poisson process for simple columns of event times for the five phenomena.
Probabilities of transition between years with events and years without were calculated with the help of Markov chain analysis on the basis of the above-mentioned time series.
The entire project is work in progress and includes also similar analyses for other medieval polities during this period (until now China, Egypt, England and Hungary; cf. also J. Preiser-Kapeller, (Not so) Distant Mirrors: a complex macro-comparison of polities and political, economic and religious systems in the crisis of the 14th century. Working paper for the International Conference “The Angevin Dynasty (14th Century)” in Targoviste (Romania), October 21st-23rd 2011; online:  http://www.academia.edu/512025/_Not_so_Distant_Mirrors_a_complex_macro-comparison_of_polities_and_political_economic_and_religious_systems_in_the_crisis_of_the_14th_century – also with indication of data sources for these calculations – and http://www.academia.edu/3077069/A_statistical_analysis_and_a_first_simple_model_for_internal_instability_in_the_Byzantine_Empire_1200-1453_CE). Comments are always welcome.
All calculations and graphs were done by the author with the help of the software programmes Microsoft-Excel* and PAST* (Version 2.17); any usage of material or data only with approval of the author!

Klimawandel und Naturkatastrophen beherrschen oft die Schlagzeilen. Im Vortrag sollen Quellen und Methoden für die Rekonstruktion von früheren klimatischen Veränderungen und Naturkatastrophen ebenso dargestellt werden wie die Wirkung dieser Ereignisse und ihre Wahrnehmung durch ZeitgenossInnen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem Nahen Osten in der Zeit zwischen 300 und 1600 n. Chr.

Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that:...

Thematic introduction for the Workshop "Harbours and Maritime Networks as Complex Adaptive Systems", SPP 1630, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, October 17th-18th 2013, see:
http://www.academia.edu/4473733/HARBOURS_AND_MARITIME_NETWORKS_AS_COMPLEX_ADAPTIVE_SYSTEMS

Between the foundation of Constantinople as capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire in 330 CE and its sack by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 CE, the Byzantine Empire underwent a full cycle from political-economic stability, through rural insecurity and agrarian decline, and back to renewed prosperity. These stages plausibly correspond to the phases of over-extension (K), 2 subsequent release (Ω) and recovery (α) of the Adaptive Cycle in Socio-Ecological Systems. Here we track and partly quantify the consequences of those changes in different regions of Anatolia, firstly for rural settlement (via regional archaeological surveys) and secondly for land cover (via pollen analysis). We also examine the impact of climate changes on the agrarian system. While individual histories vary, the archaeological record shows a major demographic decline between ca .650 and ca. 900 CE in central and southwestern Anatolia, which was then a frontier zone between Byzantine and Arab armies. In these regions, and also in northwest Anatolia, century-scale trends in pollen indicate a substantial decline in the production of cereal and tree crops, and a smaller decline in pastoral activity. During the subsequent recovery (α) phase after 900 CE there was strong regional differentiation, with central Anatolia moving to a new economic system based on agro-pastoralism, while lowland areas of northern and western Anatolia returned to the cultivation of commercial crops such as olive trees. The extent of recovery in the agrarian economy was broadly predictable by the magnitude of its preceding decline, but the trajectories of recovery varied between different regions.

During the examination of the historical geography of the Danube-Tisza Interfluve, the reconstruction of the medieval landscape was carried out, within which the channel conditions of the main watercourses were sketched. The Vajas River is assumed to be the most important medieval tributary of the Danube. It can be located based on historical maps, medieval and modern written sources. During the research, it turned out-based on our sources so far-that there was no tributary called Vajas on the right bank of the Danube. Only the tributaries/branches on the left bank of the river were called Vajas. The Vajas River was not uniform but consisted of at least four sections in an area of about 140 km from Kalocsa to Plavna.

My conference paper examines the visionary nun, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and her understanding of the natural world. Much scholarship on Hildegard rises out of feminist, musicological, and theological inquiry, but little has been done from an ecological perspective. My research disrupts this relative quietness through the use of environmental history methodologies. After reading Hildegard's most important texts, including her theological treatises Scivias and Book of Divine Works, medico-botanical works, and correspondences, I argue that her monasticism, theology and teleology were in fact integrated with her daily ecologies. She saw harmonious relationships everywhere in Creation, into which humans were interwoven and could “never be separated” (Scivias). I will present a case study on key visions from Hildegard’s Scivias to demonstrate the importance of ecological imagery in her early career. Upon a backdrop of failing relationships with the nonhuman world, it can only be helpful to study alternative environmental ethics, such as those of cosmologically minded individuals like Hildegard. Thus my research adds not only to the growing field of medieval environmental history, but also to contemporary conversations around the environment.

Though sometimes at odds, the religious and economic identities of medieval monks could also reinforce one another. Benedictine monks throughout the medieval world engaged in the economic transformation of the world while also seeking to flee many kinds of secular involvement. In the early and high Middle Ages, the monks of the Ardennes actively worked to reconcile this by constructing a religious framework for their practical activities. They controlled, managed and engineered water resources, and created miracle stories that highlighted these activities. Medieval monks had cultural and religious reasons for creating stories about water control, and religious stories need a firmer place in discussions of environment and technology. This article demonstrates that monks were able to use their religious authority and their control of religious message to support and supplement their temporal powers. The control of water resources was more than an economic or practical necessity; it wa...